Umberto Eco has left us

Umberto Eco, born on 5 January 1932, was a distinguished Italian linguist, specializing in semiotics. and a successful novelist, author of The Name of the Rose (1980).  This first novel sold several million copies, was translated into over 40 languages, and gave rise to a movie in 1986 by the French director Jean-Jacques Annaud, with Sean Connery in the role of Brother Guillaume de Baskerville, an ex-inquisitor investigating the suspicious death of a monk in a monastery in Northern Italy. Click here to view the opening of this powerful movie. Personally, I look upon this work as a total success, compared with the total failure of the infamous book and movie by Dan Brown.

All's well that ends well

David Cameron's marathon in Brussels seems to have culminated in a happy ending, enabling him to return to London with sufficient benefits to convince his fellow citizens that the United Kingdom should remain a member of Europe.

But I hope that this is not merely another Antarctic penguins story...

Antipodean penguin-counters probably screwed up

You might have found my title a little hard to understand. Well, an Antipodean penguin-counter is simply an Australian or New Zealand technician whose job consists (among other activities) of counting penguins. Now, this job has intrigued me since I came upon news of the disappearance in Antarctica of no less than 150,000 Adélie penguins, which were probably annihilated by the arrival of a gigantic iceberg.

The thing that puzzled me most was that this sad news — which appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald on 12 February 2016 — did not say whether observers in Antarctica had in fact found traces of countless dead penguins. I imagined therefore that their crushed bodies were hidden beneath piles of ice and snow.

Information on the alleged catastrophe had been supplied by researchers on climate change from the University of New South Wales and New Zealand’s West Coast Penguin Trust, who had published an article on 2 February in the review Antarctic Science, edited by Cambridge Journals Online. In fact, I don't subscribe to those publications. So, I failed to double-check the story.

I now learn that a New Zealand academic named Kerry-Jayne Wilson has stated: "I don't know who started to spread that information, but we never said that 150,000 penguins had died. The birds probably migrated to some other place, to await better weather." As you can see, the plot does not thicken. It actually thins... like melting blocks of ice.

Now, while we're looking forward to more precise information concerning the alleged catastrophe in Antarctica, let me tell you a great penguin story, which took place in Sydney back at the time I used to live there. My mate Jimmy (who told me this true story) was contacted by his friend Bob, who did delivery jobs for Taronga Park Zoo.

Bob: "Tomorrow afternoon, Jimmy, I'm supposed to drive down to the wharves to meet a ship from Antarctica, pick up a rare species of penguin and take it to the zoo. But I've got to get my van repaired, so I can't carry out this task. It's a well-paid job. Here, I'll give you all this money if you're prepared to replace me. All you've got to do is pick up the penguin at the wharves, and then take it to the zoo."

Everything worked out well. Jimmy picked up the rare penguin, as requested by his mate Bob. But, towards the end of the afternoon, they all met up unexpectedly in the middle of the city. And Bob was surprised to see the penguin walking down the street alongside Jimmy. Bob was furious.

Bob: "Jimmy, what the hell are you doing here with that penguin? I gave you cash, and told you to take the penguin to the zoo."

Jimmy: "Calm down, Bob. I took the penguin to the zoo, exactly as you asked me. We had a great time there, all afternoon. The penguin loves the zoo. He was thrilled above all by the monkeys and elephants. But we've still got a lot of money left over. So we decided to come back here to the city to see a movie."

BREAKING NEWS: Click here to access yet another article, published today in French, concerning the alleged plight of the Adélie penguins.

To be in Europe, or not to be in Europe?

That is the question, concerning Britain's future relationship with Europe, to be handled in Brussels today and tomorrow.

Donald Cameron and the European president Jean-Claude Juncker

The United Kingdom is indeed a member of Europe today, and most Europeans hope sincerely that this will remain the case.

For the moment, Britain is not exactly a typical member of Europe. The UK doesn't use the euro currency, and it is not a signatory to the Schengen Agreement of 1985. Meanwhile, Britain is seeking further special concessions from the European members. And, within the next day or so, we'll probably know whether Britain's demands have been accepted or rejected at Brussels.

Prize-winning photo from an Australian

Warren Richardson is a freelance photojournalist currently working in Eastern Europe. Born in Australia in 1968, he is a self-taught photographer who undertakes long-term projects dealing with human and environmental issues, as well as assignments for newspapers, magazines and companies. He has lived in Asia, the USA and Europe, and during a period in the UK and US he worked in celebrity photography. While working on the Serbian-Hungarian border in 2015, he was one of a group of journalists covering the refugee crisis who were beaten by police. His next project will see him walk to the Arctic Circle, to continue his refugee stories, and then explore the effects of human-induced climate change on the world. He lives by the proverb: "We have not inherited the land from our fathers, we have borrowed it from our children."

Australian photographer Warren Richardson

Richardson's award-winning photo

Hope for a New Life

A man passes a baby through the fence at the Hungarian-Serbian border in Röszke, Hungary, 28 August 2015. Warren Richardson had been camping here for five days when a group of 200 refugees arrived. They started to attempt to cross the frontier, while making sure to avoid the police. The entire operation took several hours, and Richardson's prize-winning photo was taken at 3 o'clock in the night, without a flash, so as not to attract the police.

Odd words: those that most people don't know

I've often felt that certain ordinary words (either in English or in French) have a curious tendency to remain unknown by people who are not native speakers of the language in question. I shall refer to them simply as odd words. For example, the trivial English adjective "sole" (meaning "only", as in "the sole candidate") appears to be an odd word for many French people who've learnt English at school. I don't necessarily understand why such odd words come into existence.

In everyday French it's easy for me to discover odd words. In most cases, they're French words that I myself have taken ages to know and use. As in English, it's often hard to understand why such and such a word might fall into this category. Here (in my opinion, which might be misguided) is an example:

In the title, I would suspect that "mouise" is an odd word for most English-speaking readers who've learnt French at school. We see that Sarko is in such stuff. But what in fact is it? Well, basically, the journalist is using polite language (?) to say that Sarko, for the moment, is waddling in shit.

This "mouise" term means "gruel" or "porridge", and it probably comes from a Dutch noun akin to "muesli". In our English culture, we all recall that Oliver Twist dared to ask for a second serving of such muck.

I suddenly recall one of my favorite jokes. A slave driver informs his hungry men that he has some good news and some bad news: "The good news is that the chief allows you to survive by eating shit. The bad news is that there won't be enough shit for everybody."